Umberto

I’ve been back home from Malta for a couple of weeks now. In the conclusion of my last post I said I’d keep you guys posted on other dives there. Unfortunately there were none.

The day after the three dives with David from onebreathfreediving.com, I decided to take a rest day from diving and take the mountain bike out for a spin around the north part of the island (as you might have already read in the previous post). It was good fun and I saw some of the prettier, less crowded places of Malta.

Unfortunately the wind picked up that day and even though diving on the west side of the island would still have been possible, in the days after it wasn’t. All I could do was monitor the weather closely and on the last full day of my holiday the wind finally died down. Problem was: now the bay was full – and I mean really FULL – of purple jelly fish, which didn’t exactly make me eager to enter the water…

Look closely to spot the purple jelly fish

This meant the rest of my last day was spent doing some more sight seeing. I took a bus to Sliema from where I walked along the coast all the way to Saint Julian and along the way was able to take a nice panoramic picture of Malta’s capital Valletta.

When I arrived home I relaxed for a week before starting training in the pool again. I also decided to search for some extra guidance to get an even better understanding of equalization in freediving. What better way than to dive into a book about it(?):

Federico Mana is one of the equalization guru’s in the freediving scene. What I especially like about the book is that it doesn’t only have dry exercises but also a lot of practical exercises to do in confined (up to 5 meter deep pool) or open water.

Coming weeks I’ll be testing some of these exercises out, especially the ones that deal with glottis and soft palate control, and I’ll try to film a couple of them to show and share with whoever’s interested.